Useful = serves a purpose. All the things you mentioned serve a purpose.

Could a politically dissident community, such as this one, exist in the Soviet Union, where there were no boundaries as to what the government could and couldn't do to you, aka rights? Of course not; we'd all be in gulags.

Useful = serves a purpose. All the things you mentioned serve a purpose.

Could a politically dissident community, such as this one, exist in the Soviet Union, where there were no boundaries as to what the government could and couldn't do to you, aka rights? Of course not; we'd all be in gulags.

As it happens, as of a couple of weeks ago, this site has started running as a hybrid experiment. Something between an absolute monarchy, and a benign dictatorship. And although it is populated by a vocal minority of Bolshevik n'er-do-wells, nobody has been executed so far. Dissidence is tolerated in this experimental regime. Whereas non-productive destruction is not. It might be good to ponder what that means, for a moment.

No. There are no 'rights' here. None. And we hope that we will see a workable solution to peoples' knee-jerk gravitation to destructiveness. Treat each other as possible brothers in a possible brotherhood, and see how that works. You never know.

Edit: I should add that my own decisions are subject to Divine Intervention by God's Representative Here On Earth, and should my performance be found wanting, I shall be tossed out of the garden to who knows where. The site has an owner. The Monarch. He assigns a chief. The chief rules, but is himself ruled by the monarch. Streamlined, or what?

Really? I had always thought Vegas had it legalized or at least decriminalized. Why is it tolerated so much, then?

Nope, it's 100% illegal. It isn't really tolerated either, it's just so rampant the state doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell of stopping it. They do organize crackdowns on occasion. Ever since the mob lost the last of it's (major) influence there in the early 90s the city has been trying to make the strip more "family friendly".

Nope, it's 100% illegal. It isn't really tolerated either, it's just so rampant the state doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell of stopping it. They do organize crackdowns on occasion. Ever since the mob lost the last of it's (major) influence there in the early 90s the city has been trying to make the strip more "family friendly".

"family friendly" - I fucking hate that term.

But anyway, that's interesting. Do you think it would be wiser for the city to regulate and subsidize it? Could potentially bring in a lot of $ - with peoples' fascination of money nowadays I'm surprised they haven't.

"Of course, no feminist ACTUALLY wants this - they want men and women to be treated the same, but once they find out how men actually interact with each other, it offends them, and so they must change men's behavior to fall in line with how they actually want to be treated, which is "as women."

Truth, however you are making a blanket statement again. There are plenty of women who consort with men as friends instead of women. Think tomboys, they're not uncommon. Not all women are 'ladylike'; not all wish to be treated as such - and this is not just a modern phenomenon. (Though it is far more common now)

"This is not how you run a society. You claim membership to an ideology that CLAIMS to seek maximization of everyone's (i.e., women's) potential; and yet drop something like this, showing that you care little for what is purportedly the driving motivation behind all sorts of -isms, including feminism. "

No, I said that because - unlike the implications in your statement above - I don't think women are helpless. Additionally I never said I support feminism outright - that's just something you've tacked on to my statements. I happen to support some things which fall in line with feminism, but not really the movement as a whole, especially considering what happened to it.

"They have tremendous energy, actually. I doubt you have actual experience living among such people, because if you did you would not be saying something so visibly false."

I have no experience living in Africa, true. I have no doubt that many in Africa live happy, healthy lives. But what I was getting at is that we on this board seem to idealize these more 'traditional' societies, and sometimes lack objectivity when discussing them. The kids in Ethiopia may have energy, but I can bet a lot of them would love to read. (literacy rate is around 30%)

"Like I said: interact with people who actually live these lives. Get as far away from Western influence as you can. Based on your positions in this thread, I assure you that you will be shocked at the levels of contentment you discover. Don't rely on emotional movie plots or political gambits to guide your view of worlds different from our own."

I'm not shocked, man. You're projecting. I've interacted with a great many people from non-Western countries, and most of them were incredibly pleasant. Many interesting discussions were had on aspects of their country and day-to-day lives. I don't rely on movies or political gambits for my opinions, I read, discuss and listen. Again, I don't doubt that many are content living this way (and that it holds advantages over Western society) - but I still hold to what I have said. There are significant disadvantages, and they shouldn't be swept under the rug without discussion.

"If this were true, and it were also true that women were owed this "right," howcome it took tens of thousands of years to achieve this state? Are you saying that women were too dumb to convince their men in the past? Are you saying that they were so trodden-upon that they were literally incapable of standing up for themselves? Or are you saying that they understood the concept of a division in responsibilities among men and women?"

I'm saying it's probably a combination of the three, if anything. There have been a lot of dumb women, a lot of dumb laws that have restricted women, and a lot of women who played their role alongside the man. At some point, the dumb women got mad at the laws and the women playing their roles, and now you have modern feminism. Besides, the concept of rights didn't come along til we were more evolved, why use the example of tens of thousands of years when humans back then couldn't even comprehend that shit?___________________________________________________________________________________________

"But women act essentially the same everywhere you go - there are varying degrees to which they reinforce their own varying traits, but the primary essence of womanhood I have never seen changed."

I've seen those who defy this. It's a shame we are limited by our own experiences.

"Ultimately, though, it is still men who set the field on which women play. And this will always be the case. And it is good."

You forget the disclaimer: AS LONG AS THE MEN ARE GOOD, IT IS GOOD. There have been too many shitheads in the past who have forgotten that just because a woman may be the caregiver, she does not deserve to be spit upon. We have to solve men, before we solve women.

Women are often flighty, passive, sentimental, and overall more susceptible to emotion.

But Nature, in its infinite wisdom, gave men opposite, but equally harmful if left unchecked, vices: stubbornness, callousness, Machiavellianism, and overall greater susceptibility to lust, be it after carnal pleasures, money, or power.

Virtually every aspect of society, from politics to academia, from business to religion, benefits from having some degree of mixture of the sexes, as they complement each other by compensating for the other's inherent weaknesses.

Also, it should go without saying that these traits are not mutually exclusive and should not be treated as absolutes. Humans are biological entities, and the only absolute in biology is death.

Regarding the right to vote I think people kind of missed the point. The question is not whether or not women should be allowed to vote, it is whether we should select our leaders by a vote in the first place and if so how should the right to vote be earned? If we are to have a vote, something which is probably not a good idea anyway then people should have had to have demonstrated their capacity to make an informed choice about leadership in some way, the gender of the person is only a secondary, and probably irrelevant consideration.

Within the current system (not questioning democracy itself i.e.), since we no longer have the vote restricted to the landed, I always thought it would be a good idea to have one vote per household. I do think women voting is a poor idea, gender does matter here. Averaging it out, women are more materialistic and prone to being swayed towards political positions with emotional fervour (Thank you Obama!!!). They are also more prone to rationalize; something both sexes are guilty of true, but not equally so. Informed choices dont really matter that much on large scales considering humans are fundamentally irrational and can list what they believe to be informed reasons after the fact whether or not that was the actual case. Do the members here believe that it is good for women to have political power independent of men?

Then again, I consider the pursuit of a career to be an exceptionally poor idea for women as well (in general). No better way for a nation to die by its own hands. Lots of short term material reward though; especially for things like the advertising industry.

There is a womanly aspect to liberalism. Unfortunately, modern smart male types have big hearts and modern women resemble men more than ever. Additionally, men are just hard-wired to have a patron/protective instinct towards women and this contributes here. Therefore the traditional wisdom about the feminine nature, I have found, does not sit well even with some supposedly anti-feminist types. At some level, they seem to wish for some kind of equality. I think that is grossly unfair on femininity, which is beautiful independent of its relationship to masculinity and male pursuits. Testosterone is the magical difference; the go-getter hormone, foetal exposure to which results in subtle changes in addition to obvious ones.

Good comment Trystero. There are some left-oriented people here, along with the rest, and such people automatically assume certain things to be 'good', such as equality across the board, and sex is irrelevant, etc. There is no convincing or persuading them otherwise, because the very nature of left-leaning thought precludes the questioning of certain quasi-truths. You know, and I know, that women respond very differently to life than men do. Yet the truth remains that these days, the lines have become very blurred between male and female.

If we are to have a vote, something which is probably not a good idea anyway then people should have had to have demonstrated their capacity to make an informed choice about leadership in some way, the gender of the person is only a secondary, and probably irrelevant consideration.

Yes. I agree. Why even bother casting a vote if you know nothing about what the running parties or their candidates stand for?

I'm not against voting (the idea of it) but there needs to be strict selections of who can and cannot.